Everyman Classics: The Mill on the Floss

Dorlcote Mill is home to the Tullivers and their children, Maggie and Tom. Tom, practical by nature, is forced to study; while Maggie's quick, imaginative intellect - an anomaly within the narrow provincial world of St Ogg's to which she belongs - is censored. The story of 'The Mill on the Floss' is one of frustrated intelligence and frustrated longing. A disappointment to her mother, and disapproved of by her aunts and uncles, Maggie yearns to be loved and admired as unstintingly as she loves and admires her morally rigid brother. This need is answered first by Philip Wakem - whose passion she cannot return, and whose friendship is forbidden her - and then by Stephen Guest, whose love irretrievably compromises her. Cast out by Tom, Maggie is ostracized by society and faces the bleak consequences of renunciation.